The Letter
by Germanic
Summary: When Hawkeye has a failure on the operating table, he sits down to write a letter of how sorry he is that someone's son didn't make it. Sometimes mistakes happen though...[OneShot]


**I do not own MASH**

**A complete one-shot**

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**The Letter**

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Hawkeye sealed the envelope that sent away his troubles. That did not remove the pain that resided in his heart. Slowly he pushed the envelope into the basket on Radar's desk before sitting back in the stiff chair that Radar O'Reilly often read comics in. Addressed on the label was a woman, Hawkeye knew little about. He could guess she was home alone, since the recently deceased corporal's father, had died when he had been young. That didn't mean Edward Thomas's mother was alone. In fact the report on him, had mentioned a fiancee. Maybe Private Thomas's mother sat alongside the woman...hadn't her name been Claire? Together they worried about their Edward.

And he had failed them. While the Corporal had come in terribly beat up and all, it had been up to Hawkeye to prove the odds wrong, one more time. Yet he had failed, and with that terribly. Both Henry and Trapper had told him it wasn't his fault, they had even tried to comfort him, but he couldn't and refused to be comforted. He took his grief into the office and had written out a letter addressed to Mrs. Thomas. During his time when he had no words that could say how sorry he was, he looked into the box that had the corporal's personal belongings, he found a silver pocket watch and in it was the picture that showed a blonde haired man hugging his arms around a brunette's waist. The man was wearing plain clothes of a civilian and the woman, had her hair pulled back. They looked like a nice couple, and here he had torn them apart.

He sat back and became drowned in grief. Then turning to the bottle of whiskey closest by, he began to drink. He had been in there for about three hours, becoming fairly drunk, when Radar suddenly came into the room, scrambling around looking solely for Hawkeye, "Sir? Sir!" He sounded frantic.

"What is it Radar?" His voice was hard to understand through the deep smell of bourbon and whiskey, which were thick enough in the air to make one become drunk by mere intake of the flumes.

"Sir," he took a pause before pulling the empty bottle away from Hawkeye's hand, "Where are Corporal Thomas's belongings?"

"Right," he hiccuped, "There."

"Sir, there was a...a mistake," Radar said slowly, "You didn't operate on Corporal Edward Thomas, Sir. You instead operated on another man, whose tags were switched with Thomas's."

"So...wait?" Hawkeye clinked down the glass in his hand, "Edward Thomas, isn't dead?"

"Right Sir."

In his moment of pure joy, Hawkeye took the letter and tore it until he saw nothing but shreds, then he jumped up and ran into post-op, right past Radar, right past three different nurses. Somehow the words that someone had still died hadn't sunk in just yet, right now what seemed to mean the most to him, was that the man in the picture with his arms around the brunette.

After he jogged there, he found a man who was pretty beaten up, fitting the description of Edward Thomas, and then he went and pulled a stool by that man's bedside, "Mr. Edward Thomas?"

Hawkeye had already grabbed the clipboard and had paged throughly well enough to see that the Corporal was being shipped home for all that he had done, and when he looked at him, he saw the many broken bones on the boy's body.

"Yes Sir?" His voice quaked a little, as he spoke. He could barely move, and he worked hard to cran his neck so that he could see where Hawkeye Pierce stood.

"You're going to be shipped home."

"So I heard," he rested back into the pillow, "Do you still have my pocket watch? I don't it want it to be lost on the field in Korea."

"And it won't be," Hawkeye assured him, "I saw it myself. It's silver and it has a picture inside, right?"

"Yes Sir," he said, a smile stretching over his face, "Her name is Claire, and I plan to see it through to the name Claire Thomas."

"You're a good guy," Hawkeye said before getting up, "I'm sorry I almost wrote a letter of bad news to your family."

"It's alright Sir."

This time when Hawkeye left, he went and sat down in Radar's chair and began a new letter. This time the letter brought better news then the first. This time he addressed it with a more fitting title.

_Dear Mrs. Thomas and soon to be Mrs. Edward Thomas,_

And that was all that mattered.


End file.
